He wasn’t like his mother. He wasn’t anybody’s copy. His mother hadn’t been like him.
She was in love …
He’d not known his mother when she was seventeen. She might have sat in that same chair. She might have used this same lift. Walked these same corridors…
Been in love…
He had a father somewhere. His great-grandmother knew who it was. She had all the names, and held them as bait to draw him out, to get pieces of him in her reach, more deft than any psych.
He was used to the station as his mother’s venue. That was where she’d lived, and Finity’s End was where she’d come from .
But this corridor, these places, all this was a place she’d walked in, too, like some hidden room of her life where she’d been as young as he was now and where people remembered her in the same awkward, mistake-making years he was trying his best to grow out of.
It shook him.
It totally revised his concept of where he was and what he’d come from and who that seventeen-year-old twelve-year-old he roomed with really might have been to him. Here he was wandering around blind, in her young years, meeting people who’d wanted him because they’d lost her and to whom the whole reality of the station was a locked room they couldn’t get into, either. And Jeremy was the bridge. Jeremy was the might-have-been, the one he’d always have been with. His mother would be dead, maybe, with Jeremy’s mother, with half the people on the ship… and things would be a lot the same, but different, vastly different, too.
He rode the lift back to A deck and walked back where he’d come from. His nerves weren’t up to a challenge of things-as-they-were or a confrontation with Madelaine Neihart. He just wanted to go back to the mess hall and to Jeremy, that was all—even to go back to Vince and Linda. He couldn’t feel the ship moving, but they were shooting unthinkably fast toward the nadir of the Tripoint mass-point, where another event he didn’t understand would happen and they’d more than accelerate: they’d plunge a second time out of the known universe into a state his mother had chosen to live in, that she’d ultimately chosen to die in.
He’d failed that unit in his physics class—how the universe didn’t like the state they’d be in, and spat them out reliably somewhere else. He agreed with the universe: he didn’t like the state they’d be in and he didn’t want to imagine it. He didn’t know whether he could understand it, but when he’d had to study it, he’d pleaded with his physics instructor he didn’t want to take that tape again, please God, he didn’t want to… and the psychs had gotten into it. Finally the school had exempted him and let him study it and just barely pass it realtime, with pencil and paper, because the psychs said there were special psychological reasons that the instructor and the school weren’t equipped to deal with. They’d offered to help him deal with it. And he’d said no. And somehow it hadn’t come up again.
No more exemption, now. No more psychs to step in and say let Fletcher alone: he can’t deal with it. The court had forgotten all about that fear when it gave him up and stripped him of his Pell ID. His bitter guess was that it had stopped mattering to most people the second somebody mentioned fourteen million credits. Quen had reached out and tapped some judge on the shoulder and said, Let them have him this time.
And ironically, completely unexpectedly, the only person in the whole affair who cared—personally, cared, as it turned out—might have been the lawyer, Madelaine. The crew at large, meanwhile, didn’t know what he’d grown into, but thought the courts were holding from them some poor stupid kid it was their right to have, a kid whose spacer heritage would leap to the fore and instantly make him love them.
The ship unfortunately didn’t turn around to undo its mistakes. It only went forward and it didn’t stop for anything, that was what that long-ago physics tape had told him… the universe abhorred their situation half in hyperspace and half here and spat their bubble along the interface until a mass-point snatched them into its gravity and jerked their bubble remorselessly flat. When he thought about it, walking a corridor on a ship courting that event, the space that connected him to Pell felt stretched thinner and thinner, as if his whole universe could just tear and vanish.
His mother had died like that, hadn’t she? Her mind had just—stretched thin until one day there wasn’t enough left to get her home again.
Madelaine had all the wit he hoped his mother had had, needle-sharp and quick as he imagined now his mother might have been if she hadn’t been out on drugs and if he hadn’t been a feckless five-year-old. He couldn’t ever know her, clear-eyed—couldn’t ever sit in a room with her as he’d just sat with Madelaine, to have clear memories, or to sort out her pluses and minuses. He had memories of his mother being happy, and smiling, but he’d told himself in the maturer, more brutal judgment of his teenage years that those had all been days when she’d been high as the drugs could make her and still function—when the body was on Pell Station, but she wasn’t.
Love? She’d exuded just enough to rip the guts out of a kid. She loved somebody whose name Madelaine dangled before him? Had his kid?
Then why in hell had she lost herself in drug-hazed space? Post-birth depression? He wished it were that simple.
He went back to the mess hall and, finding there was nothing doing at the moment, had a soft drink. They were free. It was one benefit of a situation that felt, again, like the trap it was.
“So what’d Legal want?” Jeremy wanted to know,
“Just passport stuff,” he said. He didn’t talk about it. He didn’t want Jeremy for a confidant on this point. He didn’t at all want Vince and Linda, who were lurking for gossip. If Vince had opened his mouth right then, he’d have hit him.
He fought for calm. He tried to settle down and just go numb about the situation, telling himself that a year, like all other periods of time, would pass. He’d learned to wait in doctors’ offices, in psychiatrists’ offices, in court. “Don’t fidget,” the adult of the month would say, and he’d stay still. When he stayed still nobody noticed him. A year was long, but his fight to get to Downbelow had been longer. He did know how to win by waiting. Don’t feel anything. Don’t say much. Don’t engage anybody the way he’d engaged the lawyer. He’d made the one mistake up in Madeline’s office… made the kind of mistake that gave manipulative people and lawyers levers to use.
No. She’d already known him, before he ever walked in that door. He was her great-grandson , and she’d lost her daughter and her granddaughter and now she wanted a try at him, seeing his mother in him. That was something he’d never faced. She was his honest-to-God real great-grandmother, and his mother had lived on this ship.
She’d just died on Pell.
Chapter 11
The shift went to bed, an exhausted mainnight in which visions of rain-veiled river danced in Fletcher’s eyes; and playing cards cascaded like raindrops, inextricably woven images, in which somehow he owed days, not hours, and in which he chased Jeremy through tunnels first of earth and then of garishly lit steel and pipe, the latter of which looked miraculously like the tunnels on Pell.
Next morning it was back to the galley before maindawn, help Jeff set out the breakfast trays and get the carts up to B deck, but they were still cooking huge casseroles for next jump… things that could warm up in a hurry, a lot of red pepper involved. Taste was pretty dim after jump, so Jeff said, and by Fletcher’s estimation it was true; spicy things perked up the appetite. While they were doing that, they’d had no further alarms, no changes in velocity. Jeff said the ship’s long, even run under inertia would give them the chance to get some baking done. Cakes in the oven during a high-K run were doomed, so Jeff said.